


Everything I Love is on the Table

by theshipsfirstmate



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, F/M, post-4x05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 15:24:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5168834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 4x05 Felicity. “She can feel it, the second he’s gone from the room, and she can’t help but think of all the times he’s left her before.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything I Love is on the Table

_Title from[“Don’t Swallow the Cap”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFnA-8H-5lo) by The National._

**Everything I Love is on the Table**

Felicity can sense it, the moment they go…wherever it is that the three of them go. She can feel it, the second Oliver’s gone from the room, the instant he’s not there with her.

Laurel’s restless throughout the process, calling out blindly for Oliver or her sister, and the stranger from his other life just murmurs softly in a language she doesn’t understand. Oliver stays silent, almost perfectly still, save for the occasional tic of the thumb against his forefinger. Felicity can’t tell if that’s calming or concerning, but her eyes stay locked on him.

She wishes she could snap out of it, but everyone else seems to be stunned as silent as she, holding their breath to wait out whatever it is that’s happening. She’s certain that she believed Oliver when he told her the world was complicated, but his awareness doesn’t guarantee anything, and panic rises like bile in her throat when she realizes that all she knows for sure is that he’s gone again.

* * *

The first time he left her, she barely knew him.

She had just been piecing everything together, the sudden confirmation that Oliver Queen’s disengaging smile and bad excuses added up to something so much more than a rich boy who was hopeless with computers, when her thoughts were interrupted by the shrill sound of the heart monitor. She remembers the frantic moments that followed, and her first true rush of affection for one John Diggle when he didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the anxious tears she brushed away furiously after they restarted his heart.

He had come back to her that time, to _them_ , with some stupid quip about not dying. She learned many things in that moment, but the one that’s stuck with her most is the acute pang in your chest when you care more about someone’s well-being than they do about their own mortality.

* * *

The next time he left, he didn’t want to be found.

She wondered idly, years later, if anything short of her stepping on a land mine would have made him reveal himself on that godforsaken island. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Digg, but the moment she heard that click, she knew just how out of their element they both were. She’s fairly certain they never would have tracked Oliver down, at the very best, they would have trudged back to Starling City empty-handed.

So, in terms of near-death experiences, Lian Yu Land Mine very nearly gets a pass, for bringing him back to her. (That he had been shirtless and sweaty on top of her was just a bonus. She held on to that one for a long time.)

He had returned to Starling, albeit reluctantly. She remembers feeling like she was still falling out of that plane until the moment he smiled at his new bow and told her it was “perfect.”

* * *

The next time he left her, he was ready to die.

She remembers how the panic in her gut when he didn’t show up to his mother’s funeral had turned to something hard and dark and hollow the longer she and Digg had searched for him. She recalls how that anxiety exploded, sending shrapnel up to pierce her heart when they had found him, crumpled in the corner of the abandoned building Waller tracked him to. The look in his bloodshot eyes still haunts her in nightmares sometimes, the way there had been nothing behind the blown pupils, just a blackness she swore she saw herself reflected in.

“It ends tonight.” His words had run her blood cold and she’ll later blame the lightheadedness for why she chose that moment to tell him something about herself, about _her mother_ , for crying out loud. It made something flash in his irises just briefly, but whatever it was was gone in an instant, and he was turning from her to tell Diggle again that the only thing left was for him to die.

He refused to say the words while looking at her, and the realization made her dig her nails into a hand she hadn’t even realized she was holding. For her last protest, she grasped at straws, trying something that had worked in the past. “There has to be another way.”

It was a masochistic part of her brain that allowed her to wonder if he was going to kiss her in the moment right before he shattered her heart to pieces, while also steeling her resolve. “There isn’t.”

That time, they made him come back. It was the only way.

* * *

(She used to count the time he left her standing in the foyer of the Queen mansion with a syringe in her hand. She doesn’t anymore.)

* * *

The next time he left was purely metaphorical.

She remembers pressing the back of her hand to her lips as she walked away from him in that hospital hallway, trying to erase a kiss that felt like everything and a half-backwards declaration of love that didn’t really mean anything at all, if he wasn’t willing to try. She allowed herself the elevator ride to hate him briefly and furiously for introducing her lips to the feel of his and taking it away in the exact same moment.

She had thought knowing for sure might be better, she thought being the one to walk away might make it hurt less. It’s the wrongest she’d ever been about anything, to that point.

He had come back to her that time, but only because he never really left in the first place. He was right in front of her for months, keeping her exactly one arm’s length away, and the only thing she really missed was a few blissful moments in an Italian restaurant before everything went straight to hell.

* * *

The next time he left, ironically enough, was when he told her loved her, for real.

It wasn’t like she hadn’t known, not like he hadn’t said it already in a million perfectly backwards ways. But when the words cracked from his throat, when he pressed them into her forehead with his lips, she knew, once and for all, they were true. And the worst part was that it didn’t really matter. Because she couldn’t keep him there, and then later, because he was dead.

It had been a new record, when he came back that time. From the euphoria of realizing her desperate wishes had come true, to holding him maybe just a little too tight, to hearing him say a combination of unthinkable words, it was less than two minutes. Less than two minutes of bliss before he pulled the rug back out from under her.

She was as close to hating him as she’s ever come in the alleyway that night, and still, her heart had thudded in grateful disbelief that once again, he had come back to her.

* * *

When Malcolm Merlyn pulled strings that lassoed him all the way back to Lian Yu, it felt an awful lot like he was leaving her again and she hadn’t been able to stop herself from telling him so.

She kept her arms crossed, fingernails digging into the skin above her elbows, so she didn’t do something embarrassing like reach out for him. Because, yes, she was furious, those were tears of anger clouding her vision, nothing more.

He was still that someone who would do anything to save his sister. Maybe he still loved her too, but that was the second thing.

Still, she thought, it wasn’t _fair_. He had just come back to her.

* * *

The next time he left was the first time she really let herself believe it might be for good.

She had to, for her own sake. She could only be so strong, could only live for so many people at once, and if he was so determined to die, the only thing for her to do was try and love him a little bit less. It was a question of survival once again, another landmine she had stepped on.

One traitorous tear had slipped down her cheek when she surveyed the city that wasn’t his anymore from a beautiful penthouse that wasn’t his either. It had been the grief, and maybe a few other things, that pushed her into the arms of the other brilliant, hard-working billionaire. The one who wanted her around, who trusted her in all parts of a life he actually planned to live.

But she was glad that Ray had been gone when she woke up, because as she came to violently, untangling herself from another nightmare, she had realized she was calling out Oliver’s name.

He had come back to them that time, but just barely. Still, something twisted inside of her made her tell him one night, just so he’d know. “As long as you’re in my life, I am.” It was the clearest she’d ever been with him, and he had smiled at her until her knees knocked together, but she wasn’t sure he heard her unspoken plea. _Stay_.

* * *

She’ll never really know if he would have listened to her, because the next time around, she’s the one that left him behind.

It had been worse in every possible way, not just because the activities of the night before were still branded fresh underneath her clothes. Oliver had watched her, as he said goodbye to the rest of his team, of his family, and then, when it was just her, he had dropped his head to his chest. She remembers how the emotion choked up her weak attempt at a joke, and how they had said goodbye with a press of their foreheads against each other instead of their words.

The blanket she had offered him on their flight to Nanda Parbat was half-soaked with tears by the time the return flight in the air, some of them shed in regret when it occurred to her that not saying goodbye had also prevented her from telling him she loved him one last time. When she sniffled herself to sleep somewhere over the Pacific, she had expected nightmares. That she dreamt of their night together was some kind of next-level cosmic punishment, for what, she’s still not sure.

He had come back eventually, and this time, there was no time to be furious or grateful or anything at all, they had a battle to fight. She blamed her shaky hands on adrenaline when she strapped herself into the ATOM suit, but it’s not until the view of the city skyline knocked the breath out of her that she had realized that this was it. Ra’s was dead, the war was nearly won, and when she caught Oliver in her arms, she wasn’t going to let him go again.

She had been fully prepared to shock him, but he fairly blindsided her with his little speech in front of the team, and it wasn’t until the sun was setting over their getaway route from the city that she fully accepted it. There was no more coming back, they were finally moving forward.

* * *

This time around, she doesn’t cry.

This time, she waits, breathing as as steady as she can get it. Waits for him to come back to her.

This time, when the three, four, of them return to the world of the living on a collective gasp that makes Felicity and the others jump in surprise, Oliver fairly launches himself into her, banding his arms around her back and pressing his face to the side of her head like he’s trying to breathe her in.

“ _Felicity_ ,” he gasps into her hair. Her favorite word from his lips, followed by her second, third and fourth. “I love you.”

She just nods, mouthing the words against his skin as she presses a kiss to his chin. They take one tiny moment that’s just for them and how he’s come back to her, and then she digs her nails into his chest, turning back to the rest of the room to see how many more miracles have happened tonight.


End file.
